By David Crystal

New from Cambridge University Press!

By Peter Mark Roget

This book "supplies a vocabulary of English words and idiomatic phrases 'arranged … according to the ideas which they express'. The thesaurus, continually expanded and updated, has always remained in print, but this reissued first edition shows the impressive breadth of Roget's own knowledge and interests."

Cinzia Citarrella, Department of Linguistics, University of Palermo, Italy

SUMMARY

This volume, edited by Martine Vanhove, is a collection of papers connected to aproject carried out by the French CNRS (Centre National de la RechercheScientifique) in 2002. The focus is on a typology of semantic associations,particularly polysemy, and the interrelated semantic changes, following a trendin lexical studies during these past years (Koptjevskaya Tamm et al., 2007).

The book is divided into three parts: a state of the art report, theoretical andmethodological issues, and a series of case studies.

In the foreword the editor outlines the structure of the book and the topics ofthe contributions. The first part, ''State of the art,'' comprises only paper byMaria Koptjevskaya Tamm, who discusses lexical studies within modern typologicalresearch. The author explores the type of meaning that can and cannot beexpressed by a single word, the type of meaning that can be expressed by one andthe same lexeme or by words derivationally related to each other, and thecross-linguistic patterns that exist in lexicon-grammar interaction. Sheanalyses two opposite positions in the research on the questions of whether ornot lexical meaning non-linguistic shared cognition and if it is based onuniversal categorization relative to basic concepts and situations. Thecross-linguistic diversity is shown by analysing data and methodology of manyworks concerning universal common features and human experiences such as body,colours, perception or motion (Brown 2005a, 2005b; Nerlove & Romney 1967,Wälchli 2006). The author highlights the difficulty in translating many meaningswhen precise semantic identity is required. Many universal concepts are notcomplete lexical universals: some languages, for instance, do not lexicalize themeaning of ‘to taste’ or ‘to touch’ or ‘to smell’ individually, meaning thatthere are words which designate a general or multimodal perception. In somelanguages, many basic words are polysemous: The lexeme for ‘hand’ may alsoinclude the meaning of ‘arm,’ and in a variety of languages, as Samoan andTurkana, the word for 'hand' includes the meaning ‘five,’ while in otherlanguages, such as Estonian or Kono, it also means ‘possession.’ Semanticvariation in different languages is also revealed by a discrepancy ingrammatical behaviour: The lexicon has an important role also in grammarinsomuch as many grammatical phenomena can be viewed as lexical. For instance,verbal categories concerning aspect and tense are strictly connected to thesemantic values of the verbs and are subjected to linguistic variability.Count-mass distinction, collectives, singular and pluralia tantum are alsolinguistic variable issues concerning category of nouns.The author also discusses methodological problems concerning the field oflexical typology, especially with regard to new methods of data collection andthe achievement of an adequate consensus on the meta-language concerningsemantic features.

Part two, ''Theoretical and methodological issues'', contains seven studies thatexplore different aspects of the theory and methodology of lexical typologyresearch. In the first paper, ''Words and their meaning: principles of variationand stabilization,'' Stéphane Robert deals with the plasticity of naturallanguages. He discusses if polysemy and polyreference are general rules acrosslanguages. He analyzes the different ways in which meaning is construed and theinterlinguistic variability regarding the meaning of a word not being limited toits referential value. Despite the existence of universal domains such as humanbody, different languages and cultures segment reality in different ways: InFrench or Italian, for instance, there is only one word to express 'toes' and'fingers' ('doigts' and 'dita,' respectively). The polyreference of certainterms is a feature of all languages. The same word is used to designatedifferent things with common characteristics. In French the word 'un bleu'(literally, 'a blue'), for example, has a lot of referents such as a kind ofcheese, a beginner, or a bruise. Robert then focuses on intra-linguisticvariability, analyzing the detectable lexical networks and semantic variation bymetaphor and metonymy as cognitive mechanisms. These mechanisms generatepolysemy, increasing the expressive potential of languages, but also ambiguity.For instance the word 'nú' in Gbaya designates the active part of an element butit is also used metaphorically for the tip of the pin, the edge of a field orthe opening of a basket. Nonetheless, the situational context aids to activatedetermined areas of knowledge base and avoid misunderstandings. In a discoursesituation, the reference frame is built through a dynamic process with differentmechanisms, such as application domains, semantic isotopics, contextuallinkages; all these mechanisms allow the stabilization of unit and sentence meaning.

In the second paper, ''The typology of semantic affinities,'' Bernard Pottiershows how semantic affinities may be the result of meaning divergence, but alsoconvergence, i.e. respectively, polysemy or parasemy. A sign is called'polysemic' when it has several values as the English word 'file,' whichdesignates a tool but also a folder, or 'plane,' which means 'aircraft' or atypology of tree or a particular tool. Sharing common values among several signsis called 'parasemy': The English verbs 'to grow', 'to increase' and 'toraise,'. for example, show parasemy because they share the general meaning ‘togo towards the +.’ The author presents a variety of cross-linguistic data anddynamic graphs to visualize the semantic relationships between terms embodied intexts. Polysemy and parasemy are grounded on different parameters: Polysemy isconnected to cultural habits, to the domains of instantiation a term is appliedto, to different synaesthetic fields, to mental schemas, used both by the senderand the receiver; parasemy may be connected to different phenomena, likepolysemiosis, semiotization and co-hyponymy and co-semy.

Peter Koch's paper, ''Cognitive onomasiology and lexical change. Around the eye,''looks at semantic change from a diachronic perspective and attempts to verifycross-linguistic and polygenetic semantic parallels that are based not onlanguage affinities or cultural contacts, but on cognitive constants. Inparticular, he analyses the evolution of words in the domain of 'eye,''eyebrow,' 'eyelid,' 'eyeball,' and 'eyelash' by detecting various cognitiveconstants.

Neiloufar Family, in her study ''Mapping semantic spaces. A constructionistaccount of the 'light verb' 'xordoen' 'eat' in Persian,'' analyses the semanticspace of the Persian light verb 'xordoen.' Through this analysis she makes asemantic map of regularities in semantic spaces. In Persian, light verbconstructions are not fully compositional, as the meaning of the whole does notderive from the meaning of the parts. The features of preverbal elementsactivate certain meanings of light verbs creating an entirely different meaning,even if motivated, if compared to the meaning of each component: For instance,the term 'soemsir xordoen' means 'to be stabbed by a sword,' but its literarymeaning is 'sword eat.' The same verb 'xordoen' has also other meanings relatedto being affected, suffering, exploiting, and being agitated as in theexpressions 'voesle-pine xordoen' ('to be patched up'), 'giji xordoen' ('to getdizzy'), 'resve xordoen' ('to accept a bribe') or 'vul xordoen' ('to fidget').

In the paper ''Semantic maps and the typology of colexification. Intertwiningpolysemous networks across languages,'' Alexandre François's aim is to discussmethodological issues of a model in lexical typology, based on the model ofSemantic Maps (Croft 2001; Haspelmath 2003). The author proposes a contrastiveanalysis of polysemous lexemes in different languages (African languages,English, Classical Greek, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Sanskrit, Latin) relatingto the notion of 'breathe' making use of semantic maps. François proposes atable to recapitulate, for the corpus of each language, the set of other sensesto which the universal notion of ‘breathe’ is colexified, as ‘take a rest,’‘blow,’ ‘take a vacation,’ ‘whisper,’ and so on. He gives a diagram that showsall the semantic values for ‘breathe’ in the analyzed languages and the semanticconnections between them. Finally, for each language, he selects particularsubsets, the so-called “isolectic sets” (p. 186), from all the potential values.His analysis reveals that, even if each polysemous lexeme is language-specific,individual pairings of colexified senses can be compared across languages. Hisdata show that it is possible to identify some semantic universals in thelexicon and that cross-linguistic variation is not infinite, but limited to arange of possible cases.

Anna Zalizniak's paper, ''A catalogue of semantic shifts. Towards a typology ofsemantic derivation,'' reflects some results of the work realized in theInstitute of Linguistics at the Russian Academy of Sciences under thesupervision of the author. She proposes a catalogue of synchronic and diachronicsemantic shifts that occurred in different languages and at different times,which reveals samples of semantic derivation. The author suggests using thesedata as criterion in linguistic reconstruction, as a basis for semantictypology, and as a linguistic evidence to analyze cognitive processes.

The last paper of the second part of the volume, ''Semantic associations andconfluences in paradigmatic networks,'' is by Bruno Gaume, Karine Duvignau andMartine Vanhove. The authors propose a method of analysis to distinguishuniversal and non-universal semantic groupings. Their work is based on thehypothesis that the paradigmatic diagrams, i.e. the graphs that show thesynonymic relations between words, of all natural languages, are hierarchicallystructured small worlds. The authors present an algorithm, Prox, whichcalculates the confluence between two vertices, which are words, so that it ispossible to quantify the semantic groupings of lexical units for a givenlanguage. According to the hypothesis of the universal structure of paradigmaticgraphs, it is possible to conduct a semi-automatic and systematic research oncross-linguistic semantic associations based on paradigmatic graphs.

The third (and last) part of the book includes six case studies focused oncross-linguistic analyses relating to different languages and semantic domains.

In the first paper, ''About 'Eating' in a few Niger-Congo languages,'' EmilioBonvini deals with the ‘eating’ semantic domain in Niger-Congo languages and therange of meaning related to it. Even though eating is a physiological experienceof all humans, the semantic domain is also used for other experiences, not only''controlled activities,'' but also ''undergone activities'' (p. 282). The term'eat' can be considered a possible linguistic universal as it denotes auniversal activity. On the other hand, 'eating' is a polysemous domain,difficult to be translated as far as its polysemous value is not universal.

The second paper, ''Eating beyond certainties,'' is focused on the semantic domainof eating as well. The analysis, both diachronic and synchronic, by ChristineHénault, reveals the existence of parallelism concerning verbs with the meaningof 'eat' and its hyponyms in Indo-European Languages and in classical Arabic,Nahuatl, Mwotlap, and Inuit. These similarities concern not only concreteaspects, but also cognitive, emotional and physical aspects related to 'eat.'For instance, the French expression 'manger des yeux', literally 'eat eyes,'means 'look avidly;' the Russian hyperonymic verb 'est' ('eat') is used in acolloquial expression as 'Nu, cto sjel?', literally 'so, did you eat it?', whichmeans 'So, you got put in your place all right!'; in Mwotlap, 'eat' isinterpreted as 'burn' in expressions as 'N-em mino,' literally 'my house hasbeen entirely eaten,' expressing that the house has burnt down. The authorargues for the existence of universal semantic associations between the conceptsof eating, suffering, and tormenting, even though more data need are needed tocheck it.

Pascal Boyeldieu's paper, ''From semantic change to polysemy. The cases of'meat/animal' and 'drink','' is focused on affinities between the two concepts of'meat'/'animal' and 'drink.' In many languages, such as English or French, theconcepts of meat and animal are distinct; by contrast, in several Africanlanguages one polysemous term is used to cover both meanings. It is a diachronicpolysemy: The original meaning is 'meat' from which the meaning of 'animal'derives. The term for 'drink' is also polysemous in several languages, but herethe author argues that it is a synchronic polysemy.

The forth paper, ''Is a 'friend' an enemy? Between 'proximity' and 'opposition',''is by Sergueï Sakhno and Nicole Tersis. It describes isosemies, semanticanalogies between different languages, particularly Indo-European andEskimo-Aleut, for the semantic domain of 'friend.' The cross-linguisticvariation is analyzed both from a synchronic and diachronic perspective, throughetymological discussions. Although many cultural factors influence language,some semantic associations seem to be shared: Data from the analyzed languagesreveal that the concept of 'friend' is usually associated with concepts ofduality, complementarity, and proximity. These semantic associations areattested both in synchronously for several languages such as Russian orAustronesian languages, and diachronously, as shown by etymological data fromold Indo-European languages.

In the paper, ''Semantic associations between sensory modalities, prehension andmental perceptions. A crosslinguistic perspective,'' Martine Vanhove proposes asynchronic and diachronic analysis of semantic associations between vision,hearing, prehension, and mental perception in different languages (Afroasiatic,Austronesian, Creole, Eskimo, Indo-European, Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan,Sino-Tibetan) in order to investigate the possibility of cognitive universals.The author proposes a typological classification of semantic associationsstarting from the examination, for each lexical item, of the details of semanticnetworks, morpho-syntactic frames, contextual uses, and historical data. Thestudy shows a hierarchical existence of physical senses. The auditory modalityprevails cross-linguistically; vision and prehension come next; it is not alexical universal that literacy privileges sight as opposed to hearing.

The last paper, ''Cats and bugs. Some remarks about semantic parallelism,'' dealswith the importance of anthropological and cultural features to explain semanticparallelisms. Michel Masson focuses his attention on parallelisms associating‘monkey’ and ‘cat’ with drunkenness and also ‘cat’, ‘monkey’, and ‘insects’ toblack mood and dreadful creatures. In different languages the name of the cat isfrequently used to designate other animals, such as civets, named 'gattozibetto'in Italian and 'chat musqué' in French, or as leeches, named 'mignatta' inItalian. Additionally, Spanish 'gato-paul' (‘long-tailed monkey’) or German'Meerkatze' (‘sea cat’) indicate different kind of monkeys. The semanticassociation between cats, insects, and monkeys has a cultural explanation ascats and monkeys have long been considered devilish creatures and the contact ofinsects with the earth makes them close to the world of the dead. Cats andmonkeys are also associated with depression and drunkenness, as revealed byPortuguese 'engatado' (‘sickly’) or Spanish 'monicaco' (‘puny’): Mentaldisturbances were considered as form of being possessed. The study aims atshowing that semantic parallelisms are not necessarily isolated, but rather,that networks of connected semantic features exist.

EVALUATION

This volume combines theoretical and practical discussions on polysemy andsemantic shift. The papers comprising the first two parts of the book arefocused on theory and methodology: principles of variation, stabilization,semantic affinities and the model of semantic maps are illustrated and examined.These studies are a good starting point for scholars who want to undertakelexical analyses and lexical typology research.

The papers in the third part of the book offer a wide range of studies throughcross-linguistic data analyses. Despite linguistic variability, some semanticshifts seem to be universal. For instance, semantic associations that linkvision, hearing, prehension, and mental perception are detectable in manylanguages. It is worth noting the range of languages analyzed, from English toAfrican languages, Austronesian, Classical Greek, Creole, Eskimo, Latin,Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Sanskrit, Sino-Tibetan. These are all very differentlanguages in terms of typology and history, and the conceptual patternsconnected with the socio-cultural elements are diverse as well.

These studies are good examples of linguistic analyses and suggest new input forfuture studies on lexical typology. The semantic domains analyzed in theproposed papers should be studied in other languages, and the collected dataexamined in order to evaluate the possibility that some polysemic domains areuniversal. The topics developed in ''From Polysemy to Semantic Change'' are also quiteinteresting from the perspective of language teaching. Polysemy is a veryimportant feature in language acquisition as it is a fundamental mechanism inlexicon expansion and organization. Regardless of being in first, second orforeign language acquisition, lexicon is relevant. The importance of lexicon hasbeen stressed in language teaching, in fact, many methods are based on expandingstudents’ lexicon (Lewis, 1993). According to the Lexical Approach (Lewis,1993), lexis plays a more dominant role in language teaching than ittraditionally has. Lexical semantics and semantic compositionality, polysemy and figurative language are fundamental issues to expand the lexicon and improvelinguistic competence.

Overall, this edited volume is a fine reader for those who are interested inapplied linguistics and especially in language teaching and acquisition. Theconclusions of the various analyses reveal it is possible to distinguish commonfeatures in semantic shifts in very diverse languages, from Indo-Europeanlanguages to Sino-Tibetan languages, from African languages to Finno-Ugric, etc.The universal mechanisms underlying semantic change may be a helpful startingpoint for developing a method to improve lexical competence.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER:
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Cinzia Citarrella, Ph.D. in Linguistics, is currently a lecturer of
Translation Studies at the University of Palermo, Facoltà di Lettere e
Filosofia, and is a certified Italian as a Second Language teacher. Her
main academic interests are Translation Studies, Cognitive Linguistics and
Metaphor, and Language Teaching.